1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image communication apparatus, and more particularly, to an image communication apparatus with an e-mail communication function.
2. Description of the Related Art
A home telephone device and home facsimile device that can transmit and receive an e-mail have been recently developed. Such devices dial a provider to connect (dialup connection) when a user instructs to receive an e-mail, and checks for the presence or absence (existence) of an e-mail received in a mail-server provided by the provider. When the received e-mail exists, such devices receive the e-mail, and display it on a display or the like.
Thus such devices check for the existence of an e-mail when a user instructs to receive an e-mail. Therefore the user should instruct the reception of the e-mail when wants to check for the existence of the e-mail, and accordingly needs a complicated operation to check for the existence of the e-mail.
In order to improve the operability of such devices, it is considered to provide such devices with a function of performing a dialup connection to a provider periodically to check for the existence of an e-mail received in a mail server, i.e., auto-pilot function.
However, in the case where such an auto-pilot function is provided in, for example, a telephone, the telephone checks for the existence of the received e-mail periodically also when a user is out of home. Therefore there is the problem that the user should pay a connection charge for the dialup connection to the provider and a telephone charge for the reception of the e-mail despite the user being not capable of checking for the contents of the e-mail.
An object of the present invention is to provide an image communication apparatus capable of improving an operability of an operation for receiving an e-mail and of performing the operation at low cost.
The image communication apparatus of the present invention is provided with a reception section that receives an e-mail at predetermined intervals through telephone lines along with an automatic telephone answering function. In the case where the automatic telephone answering function is switched to valid by a button that switches the automatic telephone answering function to valid or invalid, the reception section is configured not to perform reception operation of an e-mail. In the case where the automatic telephone answering function is switched to valid by the button that switches the automatic telephone answering function to valid or invalid, the reception operation of the e-mail at predetermined intervals is not performed in the reception section. Therefore it is possible to reduce the cost required for the reception operation in the reception section. On the other hand, in the case where the automatic telephone answering function is switched to invalid, since the reception section can perform the reception operation at predetermined intervals, an user does not need to instruct to receive the e-mail one by one. Therefore it is possible to simplify the operation of the user required for the reception operation of the e-mail.